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Roland Fortier
"My dear lieutenant, the word 'impossible' is not Orletaitien." -General Roland Fortier at the Battle of Linde during the Second Northern War, before securing a crucial victory against the Ulthenian Empire Roland Fortier '''born '''Roland de la Seine Beleaudefau, (currently known as Consul Fortier), is a Human fighter soldier and revolutionary, and one of the three Consuls of the Orletaitien Revolutionary Republic. He is considered the Hero of the Northern Wars against the Ulthenian Empire and the Hero of the Battle of Amalyne that captured the Monarchist Airfleet and helped secure the success of the revolution. He is also a member of the de la Seine family through the maternal line, despite this being largely unknown to most of the surviving members of the family. He is the founder of Les Républicains, a moderate-right wing political party supporting Orletaitien democracy, the middle class, and fair wages for wizard workers. He is currently awaiting trial by the National Assembly after being accused of assisting the royal family in their escape from the Nebastipas prison, and is a threat to the continued rule of Grand Consul Henri Legrand. Background Early Life Roland de la Seine Beleaudefau was born Thermidor 29th, 1469 ELD. His birth came nine months after his father, Louis Beleaudefau, commenced his first tour of duty in the Orletait Royal Army shortly after marrying Marie-Jeanne de la Seine in secret, without the permission of her noble family. When Marie-Jeanne learned she was pregnant with him, she fled to the de la Seine ancestral home of the Château de Saide, in Marinoît, the once-capital of the de la Seine ruled Duchy of Saide. This came at the help of Frankish Catholic Cardinal and Archbishop of Marinoît, Jerome Meynier, who helped hide the family from prying eyes, and baptized Roland. As Roland grew up at the relatively isolated Château, he was an active, if somewhat lonely young boy. Cardinal Meynier was a common sight during his early formative years, who began his earliest education and was the major male influence upon the child, enlightening a latent curiosity for history and the sciences in the tradition of his Beleaudefau heritage. When Roland reached the age of five, Marie-Jeanne finally tired of her seclusion, and had Meynier forge documents to pass off Roland as Roland Muiron, her page-boy-in-training from Marinoît, allowing him to remain with her to the de la Seine Manor in Amalyne, even if this meant he would have to stay in the same quarters as her other servants and play the part appropriately to avoid suspicion. A few months after their arrival in Amalyne, Marie-Jeanne received a letter from the army stating that an accident at the Lusitan port of Arteilmas on a naval transport ship had led to Louis Beleadefau's untimely death. In despair, Marie-Jeanne began to turn to young Commodore Horatio Notson, an up-and-coming officer in the Royal Navy, for consolation. Meanwhile, over the next four years, Roland excelled as his role, becoming good friends with the other servants, including the elven housekeeper, Monsieur Gauthier, who was the second stand-in for Roland's absentee father. Unlike Cardinal Meynier, Gauthier provided a different perspective on life in Orletait; now from the view of the common man and woman, not all of whom are wealthy or human. Throughout this time, Roland also became aware of the affair between his mother and Notson, which Notson in turn realized. When Roland was nine years old, on Nivôse 6th 1478, the order of things was destroyed by a single letter from the still-alive Louis Beleadefau, saying that he had finished his tour of duty and would be returning home, with seemingly no knowledge of his supposed death. To prevent shame from coming to his family, Notson convinced Marie-Jeanne to send Roland to the Northern Army, to apprentice under General Monteil where Louis would be unable to find him and learn of their affair. The frightened Marie-Jeanne agreed, sending Roland off to the North. Shortly after Louis' arrival, Notson faked papers reporting Roland's death by hypothermia, telling Marie-Jeanne to forget him and continue her life with Louis. The Northern Army Upon arrival in the North, the disoriented ten year old "Roland Muiron" was assigned as a servant to Lieutenant Jacques Fortier, who served under General Monteil. Jacques soon took a liking to the boy, teaching him the use of the musket, flintlock, and blade, and the tactics by which order would be brought to the cold and dangerous land. Ever restless and now finding a new purpose, Roland learned quickly, and at age 16 was legally adopted by then-Brigadier General Jacques Fortier, taking on his surname. Shortly after this, Roland formally became a commissioned officer, while simultaneously, the Ulthenian Empire began its first invasion of northern Orletait, leading to the start of the First Northern War on Pluviôse 6th, 1486. Over the next four years, Roland, rising to the position of Lieutenant by late 1486, fought valiantly, leading the men under his command with considerable distinction. However, in 1487, General Jacques Fortier died tragically in front of Roland during an Ulthenian ambush following the Orletait defeat at the Battle of Verglas, which Roland barely escaped with his life. The death of the man who had practically been his father seeded a festering rage against the Ulthenians within Roland, granting him the strength and determination, if not the wisdom, to fight the rest of the war. By 1490, Major Roland Fortier was assigned to assist the aging General Monteil in retaking Verglas, which had been under Ulthenian control for five years. Before the siege of the city, Roland found many of the men, who were recent conscripts from the south, to be vastly unprepared to break the Ulthenian lines. Against Monteil's orders, Roland rode to the nearby villages, gathering the men of the north who could handle a long and grueling siege, and having them bring whatever horses they could spare to pull artillery, as many of the Army's horses had been lost to the cold. Upon his return, Monteil attempted to have him arrested for desertion, but an observer sent by King Philippe VII, who had heard of Roland's prior exploits and respected Jacques Fortier's legacy, stayed his hand, telling him to wait and see what would come of the Major's plan. The militiamen, strong and skilled at hunting but with less formal training, took the role of skirmishers and artillerymen, with only the strongest being assigned as Grenadiers. Meanwhile, the main troops from the south waited half in reserve at the Orletait camp, and half as marksmen and line infantry. While the artillery slowly eroded at Verglas's defenses, the line infantry surrounded the city, and the skirmishers scoured the nearby countryside, preventing any Ulthenian caravans or scouts from reaching Verglas, gaining supplies for the Northern Army, which would have otherwise been nearly cut off from the south due to the priority of General Doisneau's battles against the Ulthenians with allied forces in Tethyamar. Finally, after a month long siege, the defenses faltered, and the Grenadiers under Roland's command, under the cover of cavalry, charged the city gate with the line infantry, using explosives to disorient the demoralized Ulthenians, while the line infantry on the other side of the city scaled the walls. By the end of the day, Verglas was retaken, and the Northern Army routed the last vestiges of Ulthenian presence from Orletait borders, leading to a deescalation in fighting and an armistice by the end of the year. At the war's end, Roland returned to Amalyne for the first time in eleven years, personally receiving the rank of Brigadier General from the King in 1491. He considered visiting his mother, but discovered, to his surprise, that she had two children, Aceline and Edouard, with Edouard already twelve years old, and a life with his father Louis. A life in which, despite his desire to know his father, he saw no place. Refining the Army in Peacetime Roland would spend the next year in Amalyne, instructing at the Amalyne Mliitary Academy and being hailed as a far greater soldier than he felt he truly was by his students. In addition, he found himself bored and frustrated with the monarchist politics of peacetime and Amalyne high society, feeling like a fish out of water in the nobility he was born into, a fact that was recognized by his fellow Generals with family names of their own, who considered him to be an orphan that had no true talent, but merely a child pitied by the King, and nothing more than a royal pet. This, combined with the increasing difficulty of avoiding his mother and her family, led to Roland requesting to return to the north and personally begin work on retraining and reforming the Northern Army, which was reluctantly granted by the King. From 1492 to 1496, Roland began the task of making the Northern Army the most elite fighting force in Orletait, fearing the return of the Ulthenian threat. In grand movements that were scoffed on by the military elite of Amalyne, he transferred hundreds of soldiers from the south who he saw unfit for duty. Instead, he established a military academy of his own at the fortress of Mont Nimes, exclusively for men raised in the north, who were thought to be too "un-gentleman-like" and therefore unsuitable for service by the southern Generals, allowing them to be given a military education rivaling that of the Amalyne Military Academy. Soon, by 1496, the Northern Army consisted entirely of some of the strongest (and least gentleman-like) men in the military of Orletait, all willing to fight and die for their country, if not always for their increasingly extravagant and ignorant King, eliminating the threats of entrenched dens of bandits and highwaymen with ease. In these golden years, they would become heroes to southerners, and legends of the north. The Second Northern War As the General had feared, an Ulthenian invasion once again came to Orletait in 1496, striking the villages north of Linde. Confident in his men, Roland marched to these towns and villages, with the Northern Army eager to defend its own. At the banks of the river Hébras, they engaged the Ulthenians. However, contrary to anything they had seen before, flames and lightning rained down upon the Orletait lines at every battle, destroying artillery and frightening cavalry before the Ulthenian charges would consistently route them farther and farther south. Being mainly simple men, the soldiers were frightened by what they thought were acts of the devil, and the army was eventually pushed passed Linde, which was captured by the Ulthenians, who took Duke Philippe des Chalons of Linde captive and claimed his land as their own. From his time in Amalyne, Roland knew there were two effective ways to battle a force using magic: either with the use of magical weaponry, or wizards of your own. With no way to call upon Lusitorians in time, and very few magicka weapons, Roland offered freedom to wizard slaves under his command, drastically breaking regulation, if they would help free Linde. The wizards agreed, and Roland's trusted Captain Enfeau, who spoke Ulthenian, infiltrated the city with two wizards, who were able to hide the three from the arcane sight of the Ulthenian mystics and reach the Duke's tower in the lower city of Linde. Simultaneously, two other wizards opened a portal at the bottom of a nearby lake, as the wizards in Linde opened a connected one. Water rushed out into the lower city, which had the main gates and was inhabited by the occupying force, with the Linde residents having been moved to the upper city. The force of the ice cold water proved too much for the Ulthenian barracks and the gate, soaking the soldiers and mystics in freezing water and breaking the gate. The forces of the Northern Army then took the city with ease, dispatching the remaining soldiers, and freeing an embarrassed and angered Duke. The victory, while hailed by Linde's commoners, was largely frowned upon by Orletait's military leaders and nobles, who found the General's tactics to be brash and uncouth, with the use of magic being simply unacceptable by the modern and proper rules of war. Philippe VII, however, felt otherwise, hailing the young General as a hero, to the dismay of the old guard, ensuring his command would continue. While Amalyne debated his merits, Roland led the Northern Army, now reinforced with the latest Magicka weaponry, in a dangerous crossing of the Uresiatan mountains into the occupied northern areas of allied Litau, where Orletait forces cut into the flank of Ulthenians in a serious of decisive battles, cutting off the supplies of the Orletait-bound invasion force. However, in 1498 ELD, when Philippe VII signed a peace agreement with the Ulthenian Emperor, Aleksandyr III, ending the war, the Northern Army was forced to pull back. The Grand Duchy of Litau was unable to fight back, and lost nearly half their territory due to the Orletait exit, becoming a satellite state of Ulthenia. This betrayal of the men he had fought alongside of seeded a growing animosity in Roland against the King, and his second "victorious" return to Amalyne opened his eyes to the meaningless extravagance of the nobility, and how they had no cares for the common people of any country, including their own. The Revolution During his stay in Amalyne, Roland secluded himself from noble society, spending most of his time at the military academy or barracks, learning what he could about the army and navy's organization and latest projects. At this time, he discovered the airship fleet being built by now-Admiral Horatio Notson. Knowing that such a fleet would crush any of the burgeoning attempts at change in Orletait, he was able to contact a student revolutionary in the Outer City calling himself "Le Capitaine" and inform him of this. The revolutionary assured him that the King's time was short, and a revolution would be on the horizon. After deliberation and speaking to his men in secret, Roland agreed to commit the Northern Army to this cause. The revolutionary said he would send a messenger to him when the time was right, and that a group of insurrectionist wizards would assist them. To avoid suspicion, the Northern Army left the city, marching back to Mont Nimes, before stopping in a village known for its friendliness to the army half way there, where they remained until Floréal of 1500. On 5th Floréal, the messenger arrived, and the Army began their march towards Amalyne. When they arrived, the city was in the midst of revolution, and the Roland assigned his men to help guard the understaffed airfield on the outskirts, as most of the soldiers were dealing with the attack on the Nebastipas. As the airships were preparing to leave to suppress the revolt, a group of wizards led by Elyon Mercury arrived, and the Northern Army opened fire on the monarchist troops on Roland's command, and then captured those who surrendered. The Army commandeered the airships, and transported the wizards to the Nebastipas, firing the magicka shot that burst open the prison's door, allowing the insurgents and Army to secure the prison, and use it as a stronghold to take Amalyne for the newly founded Orletait Republic. During the Storming of the Nebastipas, Roland would also meet his brother, Edouard Beleaudefau, for the first time, as well as "Le Capitaine," who was in actuality Henri Legrand.Category:Consuls Category:De la Seines